Exploring the Problem of Climate Change

Rain, rain and more rain.

It’s been raining a bit in the UK recently.
On Friday, The Times website reported that some areas of the UK had experienced four to five inches of rain in one day which, as they pointed out, is more than double the average for July rainfall(1).

Also on Friday the Guardian reported that there had been £1.5bn of damage in the last three weeks (2) and the BBC reported that at the Glade festival in Reading carparks were closed due to cars floating around in the floods, while in West Sussex a hospital was flooded(3). It was just the start.

As I write this I am watching BBC News 24, showing live pictures of Evesham where the River Avon has consumed the town and forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes. Worcestershire and Gloucestershire have been the worst hit, and there may be more to come, with more rain expected in the next week.

Severn Trent Water are asking customers to conserve water because the clean water supply situation is becoming serious, but many shops have run out of bottled water, as people have been buying it all up(4). It is possible that Severn Trent Water supplies will run out for 350,000 people (Gloucester, Cheltenham and Tewkesbury) in the early evening on Sunday, due to one of their treatment plants being flooded(5).

Oh, and just in case you didn’t know, it’s the 22nd of July.

This isn’t the first bit of strange weather we’ve had this year by any means. Remember April? It was the warmest April on record, and the first time that the average temperature of the UK had passed 10degreesC in April. It was, on average, a whole degree warmer than the previous record from 1943 (6).

It was the wettest May since 1967, and the wettest June on record. Temperatures in June were still one degree higher for UK averages for the time of year though(6).

The Met Office make clever little graphs (like the one on the “It’s getting hot in here” page), and they do one for rainfall. Basically they take the rainfall month by month and then compare it with the average for those months from years gone by, plotted as a percentage. It looks like this……….

It is very hard, if not impossible, to draw a direct link between any individual weather events, such as this one, and climate change. These floods could have happened without man made carbon dioxide emissions. But the frequency of these events is only going to increase over the coming years, and that will be due to knock-on effects of climate change. As was said in a press release from the Met Office about the rainfall in June “At this stage, it is not possible to say whether intense rainfall events are caused by climate change. However, there is an expectation of heavier extreme rainfall events in most places as climate warms and the atmosphere becomes moister.”(6)

And the climate certainly is warming. The last five years have been the hottest years in the UK on record. The hottest was last year(6).

The weather in the UK is changing, and it has been changing for a while. The question is, are we going to do anything to reduce it in the future, or are we going to sit around glued to the television, watching and waiting for the disasters to happen.